In a web site accessed through the communication network such as the Internet, commercial campaigns including a price discount, a premium sale and advertisement are often conducted in order to acquire new customers and increase sales. A campaign promoter is required to form a plan to maximize cost effectiveness by considering what kind of incentives are provided in what amount and what amount of advertisements is made for how long.
However, the campaign, if conducted as planned may not produce the effects expected initially. A campaign conducted exactly under the same conditions as those of the previously conducted campaigns, for example, may not produce the same effect as the previous campaigns in the case where the interest or preferences of the users is changed. Even during the campaign period, therefore, it is important to change and correct a plan dynamically while watching on reactions of customers to approach an original target as far as possible.
In the case where a long-term campaign of several days to several months is carried out on the web site, an access situation of the first day of the campaign is analyzed and a cause of a difference between predicted sales and an actual sale result is preferably analyzed. Based on the cause of the difference, a policy for a subsequent campaign period may be additionally corrected. If this is possible, new customers may be acquired and the sales may be increased to a target of the initially predicted sales. For this purpose, various applications that are software for access analysis have been placed on the market. A result searched on the internet (as of Mar. 19, 2008) is found that the following applications are now commercially available:
“Urchin”, [online] [retrieved Mar. 19, 2008], Internet <URL: English Site http://www.runexy.co.jp/en/ Japanese Site http://www.proton.co.jp/products/urchin/index.html>
“SiteTracker8”, [online] [retrieved Mar. 19, 2008], Internet <URL: http://www.sitetracker.jp/>
“SiteCatalyst”, [online] [retrieved Mar. 19, 2008], Internet <URL: http://www.omniture.co.jp/products/web analytics>
“Analytics8”, [online] [retrieved Mar. 19, 2008], Internet <URL: http://www.samuraiz.co.jp/product/webtrends/>
Using access analysis applications that are software now available on the market, achievements of such items as a number of users who have accessed the web site, a number of purchasers, a conversion rate and sales amount may be calculated by analyzing the access history at the end of the first day of the campaign. Incidentally, the conversion rate is defined as a ratio in which the users who have accessed a specified access destination such as the first web page or a banner advertisement leading to a particular web page have finally accessed the web page including a preset target access destination. The web page making up the target access destination is the one which displays “Thank you very much” upon complete purchase, the one of which the literature has been claimed or the one indicating the completion of membership registration. These web pages are set for each web site. The access to the web page including the target access destination indicates such acts as the commodity purchase, the request for the literature and the membership registration.
Also, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2006-268529, a system for carrying out the access analysis by modeling the behavior of the user mass against the campaign is discussed.